I am currently president of…

I am currently president of a renewable energy design / build company and am past Chair of the Biogas Association. We are specifically involved in developing small scale distributed energy systems, many of our customers are Ontario farms.
We are installing a pilot project with the support of BLOOM , named the carbon Neutral Farm which aims to develop substantially reduce the carbon footprint of the more than 3500 dairy farms in the province.

Project Methodologies.
for our pilot project we are documenting all of the current fossil fuel uses and costs and we are assessing the existing carbon footprint of the farm. We will install a digester system with ancillaries that will supply electricity , heat, bedding and will quantify each of those outputs. We will perform gas, nutrient and pathogen production / reduction using experienced lab services and we will do this three times to determine the before and after carbon offset values. and other possible monetisable benefit.

We can only afford to do this on the pilot as we were the fortunate receivers of funding to determine carbon reduction. A project of the average farm size is a 300,000 dollar capital project with a inherent cost savings of around 30,000 dollars. This is at the lower limit of acceptable ROI for a farm owner.
The work done by this pilot will inform a standard protocol for the average dairy farm and it can be reliably proposed that given a common digester technology and similar animal units then the carbon reduction on any given farm is a factor of the size of the herd and the amount of manure passed through the digester.. The farm could apply for the branded Carbon Offset value by responding to a questionnaire possibly managed thru a third party such as OMAFRA and perhaps the program could see random sampling of farms to verify the theoretical position.
To do other than this means the cost of the analysis will outweigh the carbon offset that the farmer can sell on the market ; the use of a sampling and self monitoring approach could provide the quality metrics and therefore higher carbon price that the farm needs to make these carbon reduction systems cost effective so they cash flow out in the post FIT and MicroFIT era in Ontario

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